“... the place of anti-swell-mob ones.   Presently a glimpse of green country or of distant hills may be caught between the wider spaces of the houses, and frequent settings down increase the space between the passengers; gradually conservatories appear, and conversation strikes up; then comes the exclusiveness of villas, some detached and others running out ...”

“... and what the philosopher W.B. Gallie called ‘followability’ aren’t everything, that they may be sacrificed in a good cause, then admirable precedents are not wanting. Conceits can be combined with stories at acceptable cost to the stories. A narrative line can be more or less sustained through complex verse-forms and under repeated pressure from ...”

“... Manning wished his biographer to be J.E.C. Bodley, Sir Charles Dilke’s private secretary, but he may well not have said so to Purcell. Yet, with every allowance made, Purcell does seem to have behaved in a manner that was none too scrupulous. He persuaded the curators of Manning’s papers at the Church of St Mary of the Angels in Bayswater that he was the ...”

“... he hopes that ‘the time, travel and intellectual stimulation that my present position gives me may expand the space for critical thought more than the privileges I enjoy erode it.’ John Hall, now at the University of Southampton, read history at Oxford but was seduced (his word) by Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy into ...”

“... of verse goes to the making of such a poem as ‘What is terrible’, so that his earlier work may be said to be bearing fruit, but what gives the poem life is that he has broken through the derivative verbiage which was apt to swill too freely round the more superficial layers of his mind and grasps helplessly for a bit of reality: Life at last I know is ...”

“... cannot be entirely due to the fact that the longest of them is an address to the Press Club. It may seem extraordinary that the most solid sections of this volume are devoted, not to the rarified intellectual concerns among which the author moves so easily, but to matters of family history – certainly, in the case of such a family, of more than private ...”

“... self-appointed superhuman status is nowhere justified by the play. In a materialist sense this may be true, but ‘we cannot but admire the temerity with which Mr Mason offers clusters of the most mind-ravishing quotations as a logical part of his indictment ... The play is not only about “infatuation”, it is actually written as from a consciousness of ...”

“... even trouble to make a list and puts forward no claim to theoretical completeness. The boundaries may vary and the list may be extended. He reproves me for having called the theory of genres a classification, and I take his point. Fowler sees the literary kinds rightly, not simply as a system of labels deduced post facto ...”

“... horse-dealers or lumberjacks. The conversational tone as she writes ‘home’ to Denmark may make it easier for the unconverted to understand why Out of Africa is accepted as her greatest achievement. Devotees of Karen Blixen have often sought between the lines of her African books and found nothing personal enough to satisfy their curiosity: a sense ...”

“... Liverpool has always been a special case in British politics. At first glance the pattern may appear much the same as anywhere else: Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative, with Labour intruding towards the end. The names may be the same: their significance was widely different ...”

“... and the book is so short, that the English reader is likely to be confused at a first reading, and may in the end – for all the notes provided – have still only a summary sense of them. All in all, The Meeting at Telgte is oddly summary, coming from a writer famous for his exuberance. Exuberance is present in the book, but as an idea rather than as actual ...”

“... were traded in for some fireside modesty. ‘In the years to come,’ he said once, ‘people may decide that we went about things in the worst possible way, that we got it all wrong. We’ll just have to see.’ But with Walesa there was always the likelihood of a flip retort, a quick get-out for a man who had spent his life trying to avoid the ...”

“... Productive. Efficient member of the workforce.’ Productive and efficient the steel-driving hero may be. Articulate narrator he is not. His solidity makes a point about Solidarity. His humble reflections on the upheaval around him may even be eloquent in his native Polish. But working-class vernacular must vie with poetry ...”

“... mine. Music is truly the sound of our time, since it is how we most deeply recognise the home we may not have: the loss is trust and you could reverse that without change. The shared finiteness of language, structuring the infinite and unique particulars of experience into identifying patterns, inevitably falsifies. Elsewhere Prynne writes of ‘cosmetic ...”

“... theatrical London, literary London, commercial London and, finally, maritime London.’ One may be puzzled at this description and one might have wished that the good Doctor had been more precise in his definitions and delineations. Is it possible to note so exactly these different areas of London? No such doubts exist for Mr Lottman. There is an area ...”